Ruffled Feathers in Savannah

Looks like the Wilmington Island henhouse needs to call up the 7th Ward Rooster and his crew to find out how they handle up on this business downtown.

(HT: Peach Pundit)

.

Preservation Starts at Home

Owen Courreges at Uptown Messenger points out the good one individual can do to make a place better.

I absolutely respect the impact that just one citizen can have on a place. But let us never forget how well a place can be preserved when a city's preservation initiatives are citizen oriented, progress-prone, and helpful.

.

Bipartisan Government Spending

I guess it is OK to make a case for government investment in infrastructure if the cities you help are in Georgia.

Those of us who have lived in New Orleans for the past many years know how easily that line of thinking gets turned on its head.

.

Of Heritage & Blight

So now there's one more thing New Orleans and Athens have in common: the demolition of historic structures that grace the cover of local popular culture offerings. In New Orleans, it is the Treme Shotgun Houses. In Athens, it is the Murmur Trestle.

The difference? Preservationists and conservationists have been working together in Athens for almost a decade to turn the famous bridge into a rails-to-trails project that would link East Athens and Oconee Hill with Downtown. They've even voted to increase their local sales tax to support the measure.

(That vote also included funding for a new jail, to point out another similarity.)

But in New Orleans, where sales taxes are already so high no one would vote for a voluntary increase, the Mayor made the call to go ahead and tear down the Treme Shotgun Houses - because it isn't fair to make people live in a neighborhood where that many houses are falling down.

I think that's a fair point. What isn't fair is when preservationists and private sponsors wait around for the final week to get into the house saving business. If someone had been working on those houses already, maybe they would have had the credibility to convince the city to save the structures. But as happens all to often in this city, the calls for action came too late.

Which is OK. There are plenty of blighted historic structures left around town for the preservationists and the Treme folks to invest in saving. Too bad we don't have something like this to jump start the process.

But that's the difference between "crisis-reactive" preservation and "working proactively" for preservation.

.

GOP Infrastructure

Let me get this straight:

The Port of Savannah needs $500 Million over the next few years to become a deeper, 'supermax' capable port facility. This is so it can better compete with ports in Florida and South Carolina.

This money needs to come from Washington, DC.

The GOP in control of the House of Representatives has forsworn "earmarks," which is one way to get this done. Instead, they will depend on the President's Budget to fund the expansion.

Every GOP official ran political marketing that stated the Federal government spent too much money and that President Obama is a profligate spender of taxpayer dollars. We're "leaving debt to our great-grandchildren" or whatever.

The President releases his budget today, that the GOP calls cowardly and too expensive. We don't have enough money for winmills and trains.

The Georgia GOP is upset, however, that the President's cowardly, too-expensive budget doesn't get them enough money.

So in this budget, Obama is spending too much money and not spending enough money.

.